China’s Xinhua news agency published images Sunday of the debut of a new, Chinese-built railway connecting Havana to Santiago de Cuba, the largest cities on the east and west coasts of the island, respectively.

The Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), one of the island’s largest dissident groups, published evidence of the Castro regime selling rotten meat to locals in eastern Santiago de Cuba at a market that has no functioning refrigeration, the Spanish newspaper Diario de Cuba reported on Sunday.

Cuba’s Ministry of Tourism has bought ads plastered across buses in Shanghai, Beijing, and Ghangzhou encouraging Chinese tourists to visit the communist island, the Spain-based Diario de Cuba reported Friday, in an attempt to replace the millions lost in tourism revenue following President Donald Trump’s decision to ban cruise ship voyages from America to Cuba.

North Korea state media revealed Tuesday that the communist nation had sent a delegation from its tourism agency to its close ally Cuba, presumably for advice on how to generate more revenue for the government without having to make material changes to its atrocious human rights record.

Cuban Interior Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez claimed that most Cubans support a brutal new food ration policy that has forced those in major cities to stand on grocery lines for hours, the Cuban interest site CiberCuba reported on Wednesday.

The communist regime in Cuba responded to President Donald Trump threatening a “full and complete embargo” if it does not remove its military personnel from Venezuela, denying a military presence there on Wednesday.

Cuba’s government-run Radio Reloj website published a commentary Monday referring to American National Security Advisor John Bolton as a “warlock” and “neo-Nazi” for his opposition to the communist Castro regime.

Cuban dictator Raúl Castro issued a warning to his country, already facing significant food and goods shortages, on Wednesday to prepare for the “worst case” economy in light of a campaign by the Trump administration to undermine the communist regime.

Havana’s National Hotel hosted 500 people — with an estimated 80 percent being American citizens — for a lavish feast known as “Le Dîner en Blanc,” or “The Dinner in White,” on Saturday amid a growing food shortage problem that has Cubans recalling the post-Soviet “special period” poverty of the early 1990s.

The head of the dissident organization Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) announced Friday that the number of pro-democracy activists staging a hunger strike against the regime’s violence has risen to 43 people, following a week of raids of UNPACU members’ homes in which police beat and arbitrarily imprisoned many of its leaders.

Police arrested Daniel Llorente, a Cuban dissident who spent over a year imprisoned in a psychiatric facility for waving a U.S. flag at the 2017 communist May Day parade, on Sunday after he appeared in the devastated Havana neighborhood of Regla and attempted to provide aid to those affected by this month’s tornado.

A video circulating among Cuban dissident outlets this weekend shows a convoy carrying Cuban second-in-command, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and several high-ranking communist officials forced out of the Regla neighborhood of Havana by an angry crowd of tornado victims shouting “shameless!” and “liars!”

The government of Canada announced on Wednesday that it would cut its diplomatic presence in Cuba in half after documenting a new case of unexplained brain trauma in an embassy worker, a move that the communist regime responded to with hostility.

Local Communist Party officials in the Regla neighborhood of Havana, Cuba, are selling chicken and rice to locals in the aftermath of a devastating and rare tornado that left much of the capital in tatters, the independent outlet Cubanet reported this week.

The Cuban communist regime confirmed three deaths and at least 172 injuries following a tornado landing early Monday morning in Havana, devastating at least three of the capital’s residential neighborhoods.

Cuban dictator Raúl Castro surfaced Tuesday to deliver a speech marking the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, which succeeded on New Year’s Day 1959, blaming the United States and its “merciless neoliberal policies” for poverty in Latin America.

The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights has identified at least 142 prisoners of conscience who will remain imprisoned this Christmas under the communist Castro regime, which resolutely denies the existence of any political prisoners on the island.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who answers to Communist Party leader Raúl Castro, announced on Wednesday that he will soon launch a YouTube channel and a television program intended to bring him “closer to the people.” Díaz-Canel also said he aspires to expand the presence of the Castro regime on social media to combat “adverse information.”

A Cuban man denounced the communist regime in a video published Tuesday, alleging that his local hospital prevented him from entering to visit his ailing pregnant wife because he was wearing shorts emblazoned with the American flag.

Cuba’s second-in-command, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, issued remarks Sunday blaming “the impact of the embargo, which has strengthened under the Trump administration,” for nationwide shortages of bread, eggs, and other basic good as Cubans prepare to celebrate the new year and the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.

Elián González, a Cuban former child refugee who was violently expelled from the United States during the Clinton administration when he was six, opened a Twitter account on Thursday, explaining that he wished to thank Cuban second-in-command Miguel Díaz-Canel for his birthday wishes.

Two Black Fridays ago – on November 25, 2016 – Cuban dictator Fidel Castro finally died. Two years later, the pro-democracy activists at the forefront of the fight for freedom lament that little in Cuba has changed for them, and what has changed has worsened.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Cuba’s ceremonial “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel took the time Sunday to celebrate the birthday of fellow leftist autocrat Daniel Ortega, who turned 73 years old and has ruled Nicaragua for about half of the years since the 1979 Sandinista revolution.

Berta Soler, the head of Cuba’s pro-democracy Ladies in White group, denounced the communist regime there on Tuesday for refusing to renew her passport, telling her that she was being “regulated” generally and could not move freely.